What does Britney Spears’ call out to her fans for help in naming her new album and a hotel’s query about your newspaper and pillow preferences have in common? Both ask for personal choice or opinion.
When people answer a call for their opinion, they’re often engaged. If they’re engaged—or at least interested—they will most likely get whatever message the inquisitor is tryingto deliver. Good meetings engagement is strategic, because attendees are ready to receive one or more messages stakeholders want to deliver to them.
Plenty of low-tech ways remain for engaging meetings audiences. Raised hand counts or evaluation responses written on paper are probably here to stay. But increasingly, it’s electronic hardware and software that are doing the better job of engaging audiences and re-tooling ROI measurements. Also, younger, tech-engrossed attendees prefer the new technologies, and they lead their older associates into adaptation of cutting-edge tools. Why write something with a pen and paper when two fingers on a keyboard can transmit your thoughts in a flash?
What’s rapidly emerging with the new rules and tools of engagement is a major paradigm shift that puts more control of meetings management into the hands of attendees. Instead of planners and facilitators leading attendees where the former think they should go, attendees are making their preferences known. Example: Participants send their important issues to a speaker via electronics, such as a laptop computer or cell phone.
“We are getting closer to people by customizing things toward them,” says Dorcy Bowman Rose, CMP, executive director of Rendevous, a meetings management company based in San Diego. “We are opening up more communication about what they want rather than what we think they need. Tech also creates communities of people with similar interests. They get to know one another by participating in blogs, chat rooms and webinars, and then come together with familiarity in face meetings.”
The common denominator across all newer methods of engagement before, during and after a meeting is interactivity.
Before Opening Day
One new rule of engagement says you operate as if your meeting or event starts well before opening day. You strive to create a community of people with like interests and/or work tasks who gather online to discuss issues of importance to them. The face meeting is one way the community gets together, not the only.
“Some of our clients with good, strong tech support use blogs where you download the schedule beforehand,” Rose says. “This gets everyone engaged beforehand so they can deliberate program content.”
Community is how Brad Lomenick, executive director of Catalyst, an organization purposed to develop young church leaders in the 18-to-35 age bracket, develops an audience. Catalyst organizes an annual meeting in Atlanta that attracts about 10,000 attendees. But Lomenick says the meeting is not the main thing.
“We want to create a community more than a destination,” Lomenick says. “And in the broadest sense, that encompasses both the virtual and the physical gathering. Our one event a year serves as a launch point, a family reunion of sorts. We are telling people that showing up at the meeting will increase their experience, that attending will give you an important sense of the community.”
Throughout the year, the Catalyst core community of about 3,000 receives podcasts, a free online magazine and the option to create their own identity off the Catalyst platform—a social networking tool similar to MySpace.com. Users may or may not attend the conference, but Lomenick says attendance does grow from the community.
His inspiration is the TED (Tech Entertainment and Design) Conference in Monterey, Calif. It’s a by-invitation-only annual event and costs thousands to accept. But others can connect with TED community members who may not attend the event.
Online registration and pre-event surveys are another way to engage people outside the meetings environment.
Eric Eden, vice president of marketing for McLean, Va.-based Cvent, says his company’s new pre- and post-event Contact Intelligence survey product emerged as demand for surveys increased with use of Cvent’s online registration product.
“Surveys are a good way to ask people about their expectations prior to an event, and afterwards about whether the event lived up to their expectations,” Eden says. “One component that is bringing some good response is the regret part, where we don’t just ask people if they can attend or not. We go a step farther when they say ‘no’ and ask them for reasons why they can’t attend: Is it location, schedule conflict, and so on. We ask them if they are interested in whatever offerings there might be, and we are getting 50 percent more sales leads because we offer the regrets survey.”
On-Site and Engaged
Once attendees arrive, there are even more ways to engage them throughout the real-time program. Messaging a facilitator, audience response systems (ARS), interactive nametags, and circular small group setups to promote conversation are among the now tools enhancing engagement.
At the recent Meetings Market Academy + Exhibition [Full disclosure: Meetings Market Academy + Exhibition is owned and produced by Meetings Media, the publisher of this magazine and MeetingsFocus.com—ed.] meeting in Portland, Ore., Clearwater, Fla.-based Padget Communications distributed wireless ARS keypads to each attendee. A facilitator lobbed a series of yes/no, true/false and multiple choice questions about the audience makeup, their personal experience and industry issues. Similar to how audiences vote on TV shows such as American Idol, individuals entered their answers on the pads, and the collective results were immediately graphed on a big screen for all to see. Throughout the demonstration, everyone in the room was at rapt attention.
ARS has many meetings uses, including evaluating, defining meetings objectives, securing participant support, and team building. For example, if the organization is seeking change in a number of areas, the system can be used to identify the importance of change in each area, the best plan for change, and support that a plan will have if the change is made. Or, perhaps a plan is already defined and the objective may be to secure support. Questions might ask, “Do you understand my plan? Do you agree with my plan? Will you support me?”
Caroline O’Carroll, senior meetings manager for Boston’s MC Communications, a provider of continuing medical education for physicians, has used ARS in meetings for several years. Audiences for which she’s used the systems range from 250 to 6,500 people. New ARS software and hardware makes them more effective than ever, she notes.
“On-site, ARS really enhances the presentation because attendees are really involved,” O’Carroll says. “They can immediately see their responses on a screen, and the speaker has an easy time of determining audience makeup, expertise and experience.”
The most valuable benefit of ARS, O’Carroll believes, is its ability to define ROI. Knowing audience makeup and needs in various regions can be extremely valuable for commercial sponsors of meetings.
“The reporting piece of the system is very important,” she says. “For example, it can track how doctors in various regions of the country treat asthma. With that data, a sponsor can tailor their presentations.”
Rendevous’ Rose likes ARS, too, for identifying audience makeup, issues individuals are grappling with and agenda-setting.
“These systems need a couple of tech people on-site and that can get expensive,” Rose says. “But we’ve been charged by the day, so we used the system in multiple sessions and that made it affordable.”
Electronic wireless nametags are another tool Rose likes to use for effective engagement during a meeting.
“These gadgets replace traditional paper registration badges, and they enable people to find each other,” she says. “One person can walk up to another and open a conversation, because they see they have something in common, like being in the same industry.”
Interactive nametags provide a way to mix people up at an important sales meeting—like executives and salespeople in a global company, says Paula Crerar, vice president of marketing for nTAG Interactive in Boston.
“The nTAGs are wearable technology that replace traditional paper badges,” Crerar says. “When someone is in conversational distance of another, a display lights up with data that indicates some common ground between the two attendees.
“It’s something that’s fun, and it helps people ID business contacts,” she continues. “If they press a button on the tag, they exchange business cards electronically. At the end of the event, each participant receives an e-mail with their personal nTAG page showing all the contacts they’ve collected at the event. They can export the information to other programs like an electronic address book without typing in data.”
If this sounds like something great for dating clubs, it could be. But the system was designed for business, Crerar points out. Nametags divulge only the data the event owner decides to use for clearing common networking ground, and nobody’s data gets revealed to another person unless they push a button on their tag.
After the Prom
Just like gifts that keep on giving, wireless nametags, cell phone technology, ARS systems, and Web-based tools extend a meeting or event beyond the closing date. If attendees have been engaged during the meeting, they have likely gotten the stakeholders’ messages, such as change points for work productivity. Because data capture is so easy with new tools, stakeholders can tally ROI and know whether they’ve accomplished objectives in the real-time event.
To wit: Sales contact follow-up is easier if you’ve collected all the needed information from those wireless nametags while you engaged the data’s owner. And electronic systems produce valuable data to meeting sponsors, even if it’s just cell phone numbers.
Patti Phillips, president and CEO of the Birmingham, Ala-based ROI Institute, says her firm has formed a resource partnership with both nTAG Interactive and KnowledgeAdvisors, a firm providing Web-based measurement systems and solutions for learning and organizational development, to help adherents to the Phillips ROI methodology fulfill objectives.
“Data that gets collected before and during an event can make it easy to benchmark afterwards—and extend the value,” Phillips says.
So whether it’s after, during or before the meeting, today’s tech tools can promote engagement, and thus objectives. What users should keep in mind is that the human factor in the mix is never quite as involved as it is in real time encounters—occasions Lomenick calls “reunions” of community or associates.
Otherwise known as meetings.
